


until we become no one

by quicheand



Category: EXO (Band), K-pop
Genre: Inspired by Poetry, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-02
Updated: 2013-01-02
Packaged: 2018-05-18 15:07:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5932759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quicheand/pseuds/quicheand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"But damn if there isn't anything sexier than a slender boy with a handgun, a fast car, a bottle of pills."</p><p>—Richard Siken, "Little Beast"</p>
            </blockquote>





	until we become no one

 

 

The first thing Jongin notices is the people. He's never seen so many people in one place before, crowding the streets and sidewalks, a moving, flowing, undulating mass that fills the spaces between cars and buildings so tall Jongin can't see the tops of them without being blinded by sun. He tightens the straps of his backpack, adjusts its weight over his shoulder, and steps forward, steps off the train platform and into Seoul.

 

 

Things don't go exactly as planned. Jongin had wanted to dance, but none of the companies he goes to are open for auditions at the moment, so he's stuck biding his time in the cheapest apartment he can find, but then he runs out of money, and he still wants to dance, but first he has to pay the rent.

He gets a job—nothing fancy, nothing elegant, just something that will pay just enough for him to keep a roof over his head and some food in his stomach until he can find something else, something better. He gets a job as a night custodian, at the dance department at Seoul Arts. He can't decide whether it's a whim or a coincidence that he's cleaning the floors of dance studios; maybe it was just that it happened to be the first opening he came upon; maybe it's that he wanted to be close to dance even if _he_ couldn't dance.

 

 

Sehun calls him twice a week, because Jongin had asked him to, and Jongin doesn't pick up, because Sehun had asked him not to.

“Kyungsoo came over today, and we had samgyupsal for dinner,” says Sehun's voice in Jongin's ear when he checks his messages. The recording makes his lisp come through more strongly than Jongin remembers it in real life. Then Sehun's voice gives way to cool female tones, asking him if he wants to delete the message. Jongin's thumb hovers over the enter button for a moment, but then he moves over a half centimeter to press end call instead.

 

 

He can't help watching the practices sometimes, late at night, when the studio is technically closed and it's time for his shift and he really should be mopping the floors in the hallways, but the lights that are still on in a few practice rooms where dancers who work themselves harder than they ought are still running through their routines. He leans on his mop as he peers through the slot of glass in the practice room door, watches the pliés and assemblés and tries to ignore the way his feet bend and step in place along with the dancers on the other side of the glass.

He shies away from the yellow rectangle of light when the door opens and the dancers inside slip out. He averts his eyes and pushes the mop along the tiled floor, pretends he's been pushing it along the whole time.

When he's done with his mopping and sweeping and all the lights have been turned out, he pulls on his jacket and heads out into the 2am fog and glow, hands shoved in his pockets for warmth. He's always the last to leave the studio, and the streets are almost always empty outside.

Almost always, but one night there's a kid outside, spray-painting the concrete exterior of the building. He looks up the click of the door as it closes. Jongin guesses the boy is about twelve or thirteen; his face is smooth and round, and his eyes even rounder, wide perfect circles that stare up at Jongin. The two of them are caught in a staring contest for a minute, and then the boy breaks the gaze. Jongin thinks he's going to drop the can and run, but instead he shakes the can up and down before resuming his vandalism.

“You a dancer?” says the kid.

 _Yeah_ is on the tip of Jongin's tongue, but then he realizes the kid means, is he a dancer at Seoul Arts, heading home after a long day's (night's) practice, and he says instead, “No, just the janitor.”

The kid laughs, and annoyance and indignation flare up in Jongin's chest. It must show on his face, because the kid schools his expression down into a mellow smile.

“Sorry,” he says. “Didn't mean anything by it. Just kind of thought you looked like you could dance.”

 _I can_ , Jongin wants to say, I can dance, I can, but he scowls instead, says, “What the hell's a kid like you know?” to which the kid laughs again, louder this time.

“I'm probably older than you,” he says, and Jongin scoffs in disbelief. “I know I don't look it,” the boy continues, “but I'm twenty-two.” Jongin arches an eyebrow, but the expression on the kid's face remains dead serious.

“Fuck, really?” says Jongin, and the kid nods. “Fuck,” says Jongin.

 

 

The boy's name is Luhan, and he came to Seoul from Beijing two years ago. His Korean is fluent though, so much so that if it weren't for his slipping the occasional Mandarin word into his conversations with his Chinese friends, Jongin wouldn't even be able to tell he was Chinese. He'd gotten a scholarship to Seoul Arts, and had attended for just shy of a year before he'd quit.

“You mean got kicked out,” puts in Luhan's friend Yixing, who _is_ a student at Seoul Arts. He comes out with them in the late afternoons, after classes but before evening practice.

Luhan just shrugs and smiles. “Same difference,” he says, impish.

Jongin's curious. “What did you do?”

Yixing looks at Luhan; Jongin isn't sure if he's imagining it, but he thinks there's something unreadable hidden in Yixing's eyes. Luhan gazes calmly back, then shrugs again. “Oh, this and that,” he says. “Anyway, whatever. There are better things to do with my time than dance for some posh elitist school.”

“Hey!” says Yixing. His eyes widen, but he doesn't look offended, just surprised and a little confused. Jongin can't help it; he laughs. Luhan glances sideways, eyes twinkling with mirth, and Jongin doesn't know what he even did, but he wants to do it again, do it more, make Luhan keep looking at him like that.

 

 

The thing is, Luhan's not even Jongin's type. He's cheerful and looks much younger than his age, looks like a sweet schoolboy, but laughs raucously, caustically almost, like someone who's seem much more of the world than any schoolboy.

But Luhan shows up in the hours just before dawn and just after Jongin gets off work, in a convertible that's not his (Jongin knows better than to ask where he got it), and he beckons to Jongin with a crook of his finger, and when Jongin's knee hits the latch for the glove compartment as he's climbing in, the door falls open to reveal orange plastic prescription drug bottles and a tiny pistol, and Luhan really isn't Jongin's type, but damn if there isn't anything sexier than a slender boy with a handgun, a fast car, a bottle of pills.

 

 

Luhan introduces Jongin to all his friends. “You're new in the city, so let me help you out,” he says. There's Yixing the Seoul Arts dance student; Wufan who has almost as many underground connections as he does aliases; Minseok who has a round, boyish face that's as cheerful as Luhan's but can turn baleful, then sinister, in a second; Jongdae who (Jongin thinks) is the one who keeps Luhan supplied with a steady arsenal of drugs.

“Christ,” says Jongin. “Don't you have any normal friends?”

Luhan laughs. “Yixing's normal,” he says.

“And the others?”

Luhan only gives him a mischievous wink at that.

But honestly, Jongin doesn't mind that Luhan's friends—and now, he supposes, his friends—are mostly delinquents, drug dealers, and crooks. He'd always been something of a black sheep in a town where boys were expected to be dutiful sons happy with leading plain and simple lives, and most of them were. Now Jongin's no longer the boy the neighborhood ajummas treat with only superficial politeness, whom mothers tell their young sons not to grow up to be when he turns his back; now, next to Luhan and his friends, Jongin is tame in comparison.

They break into the basement of an abandoned building. Wufan smashes the glass with a brick, pulled from the ruins of the low wall that once separated the house from the sidewalk but now is mostly a decomposing mess. They slide one after another into the window near the ground into darkness.

Jongdae's already got a joint in his mouth by the time Jongin's feet hit the floor, and Minseok leans in to light it for him. The flame glows orange and blue, illuminates both their faces in the gloom, in the dim, dusty room lit only by what little of the orange streetlight glow from outside filters in through the mud-caked windows lining the tops of the walls.

They pass the joint around until Jongin's happy and boneless, until his bones feel liquid and his skin just the glass containing it. He lies back, not caring about the filth that must be getting in his hair, and lets the sound of the others joking and laughing fade to a warm, steady pulse, comforting background noise in his ears.

It takes him a moment to realize—or to process—Luhan's presence. The other boy's kneeling behind Jongin's head, leaning over him, looking down at him curiously.

“What are you feeling?” Luhan asks when Jongin blinks and smiles in recognition.

Jongin considers the question.

“I feel human,” he says. “I feel like I'm somebody.”

Luhan laughs, and Jongin does too, though he doesn't know why.

 

 

“It's just frustrating,” Jongin had said, legs dangling off the edge of Sehun's bed. “It's just hard being nobody in a town of nobodies.”

Sehun exhales slowly. He's sitting backwards in his desk chair, thighs straddling the wooden seat and chin pillowed on his arms on the back of the chair. “You're not nobody,” he tells Jongin. Jongin disagrees with that, but he doesn't say so.

“There's nothing for me here,” he says instead. “I'm not—I don't want to be the type of person who can just be happy living in some dusty little town selling kimchi to old ladies who pinch my cheeks and tell me I'm like a grandson to them. I can't be satisfied dancing on a tiny stage where no one will ever see me. I _want_ people to see me. I want to do exciting things. I want not to be here anymore. I want to leave.”

Sehun is silent for a moment. Jongin braces himself for reproach, but all Sehun says when he opens his mouth is, “If that's what you have to do, then do it.”

Jongin stares at Sehun, wondering if he'll take it back or append his statement with a “but,” some added stipulation, but Sehun just shrugs and looks back, long and steady. Jongin doesn't know if he's more relieved or disappointed, so he covers up both with self-righteousness.

“Well yeah,” he says, drawing himself up out of his slouch. “Not like I would have stayed if you'd said no. Not like I'm going to let you dictate how I live my life.”

Sehun's only reaction is a slow shrug. He keeps looking at Jongin with the same blank eyes that Jongin's never been able to read even after knowing him for over a decade. He keeps looking at Jongin, meeting his eyes steadily, and, just like always, Jongin is the first to look away.

It occurs to him belatedly that Sehun might be upset, at Jongin's contempt of the convenience store shifts they've both been working since starting high school, or at being lumped in with “nothing,” or both. Jongin thinks of saying something, of telling Sehun that's not what he meant, but Sehun's face betrays nothing, and Jongin's never been one for apologies and self-editing.

 

 

Luhan lives his life unapologetically, and Jongin likes that about him. It's the way Jongin tells himself he lives, the way he wants to live, except the difference is between them is that although Jongin never says he's sorry with words, the apologies leak out through his actions, while Luhan has no qualms about saying sorry but he never really means anything by it, never really shows it in what he does next.

Jongin's never met anyone like Luhan before. Luhan drives 180 kph down city streets at three in the morning, windows down and whooping. Luhan uses his childlike innocence to get what he wants, flaunts his boyish good looks to get things for free, get places other people can't, and then the minute they've turned away he's laughing, chuckling at his own good fortune. Luhan keeps his pockets stocked with pocketknives and stolen candy from convenience stores, keeps the glovebox of his car, a different one every week, filled with illegal and semi-legal drugs and his current favorite from his collection of knives and firearms.

“I don't actually use them,” he tells Jongin when Jongin expresses mild concern. “But it makes me feel better to have them around, you know? Reminds me that I _could_ use them, if I wanted to. Reminds me I can do whatever I want.”

Jongin gets that. He's never had a weapon before, never carried a knife—never even seen a real gun before he met Luhan—but he gets the feeling of wanting to feel safe, to feel powerful, to feel stronger than anyone who might try to get you down.

Luhan slips in the door of Seoul Arts one night, pads silently up to Jongin where he's surreptitiously watching the dancers through the glass in the practice room door, and taps him on the shoulder. Jongin jumps and turns, and Luhan laughs, clear and bright.

“Having fun?” he asks, and it's just two words, but somehow they're laden with meaning. Jongin feels exposed suddenly, like Luhan's seen right through him, like he knows how much Jongin wishes he could be on the other side of the glass, practicing jumps and leaps, twisting his body to music.

“Come on,” says Luhan, and pulls at his wrist.

“Where are we going?” asks Jongin. He abandons his mop, leaves it leaning against the wall with its accompanying yellow bucket,

Luhan walks backwards so he can smile at Jongin. “To forget all your worries,” he says, and then adds, “Race you,” before taking off.

They fly down the corridors; Jongin thinks his feet are hardly hitting the floor—and good thing too, since he's just cleaned it. He doesn't know where he's going, just runs after Luhan, following that head of honey brown hair. Luhan laughs loudly as they run, and Jongin laughs along too. Their voices, Luhan's clear and sweet and Jongin's deeper, heavier, bounce off the walls. A couple of kids staying late to practice stick their heads out into the hall to see what's going on; Luhan and Jongin pass them in a whirl.

They wind up on the roof, breathless and exhilarated. Jongin slows his pace, but Luhan sprints right up to the railing at the edge, hitting it so hard Jongin's afraid he's going to flip over and fall to the street three stories below. He doesn't though, just grabs the metal bar with both hands and leans over, howls into the night. It's wordless and incomprehensible and pure, raw feeling, and it makes the hair on Jongin's arms stand on end, makes a shiver run down the back of his neck.

Luhan turns back to him. “Come on,” he says, “You do it too.” Jongin laughs and is about to decline, but Luhan's eyes are earnest and dark, darker than the city night around them, and Jongin finds himself walking forward to stand next to Luhan at the railing.

“Yah,” he shouts experimentally. Beside him, Luhan snorts,

“Come on,” he says. “You can do better than that.”

So Jongin takes a deep breath and thinks of all the injustices and unfairnesses, all the opportunities he's wished for but never had, all the people who have ever wronged him or looked down on him. He opens his mouth and bellows them all out into the night, lets them wrench their way out of himself and looses them into the world. He doesn't stop until his voice dies in his throat from lack of breath. He looks at Luhan then, and sees Luhan looking back at him with hair swept back by the midnight wind and a smile in his eyes that Jongin thinks might be proud.

“There,” says Luhan. “Don't you feel better?”

And weirdly enough, Jongin does, even though nothing in his life has changed, even though he hasn't done anything in particular to set things right. But the ache in his chest that he's grown so used to in the past few weeks that he sometimes didn't even notice anymore is gone, the empty space dancing left in him filled in with something new.

He looks at Luhan, his hair in a wild nest around his head, that impish, boyish grin. _Something new_ , Jongin thinks, and a slow grin spreads itself over his lips as well.

 

 

On Thursday Luhan drives past in a forest green Mustang as Jongin's walking home, dawn just showing its head over the jagged city horizon line.

“Hey,” says Luhan, slowing to match Jongin's pace, “wanna go somewhere with me?”

The engine is a low, sweet purr that hums and vibrates in the brisk morning air, vibrates down all the way to Jongin's bones. “Sure,” he says without asking where. He always says that, always agrees, because he'd go anywhere Luhan asked. Luhan leans over to unlock the passenger side door, and Jongin climbs in, stretches his legs out as far as they'll go. Luhan, as always, looks out of place in the driver's seat, looks far too young to be at the wheel of a car—yet somehow, he looks right at home, confidence making him fit the role he's assumed, the way it always does, the way he always does.

“Somewhere” turns out to be the grocery store. Jongin side-eyes Luhan as he picks up a basket from the stack at the door. Luhan laughs.

“Boy's gotta eat,” he says with a grin. Jongin supposes that's true, but it's still weird thinking of Luhan frequenting a place as mundane as a supermarket.

They stock up on eggs, on milk, on packets of seafood ramen and chapagetti, and then Luhan drives them back to his place. Jongin leans against the kitchen counter and watches as Luhan stands on his tiptoes to put the ramen away in the cabinet over the sink, as he bends to put the eggs and milk in the fridge.

He's still looking when Luhan closes the door of the refrigerator and turns around. Their eyes catch and meet, and Jongin can't look away.

“What?” asks Luhan. He licks his lips, faint smile playing at the corner of his mouth, and Jongin blinks slowly, sucks in his bottom lip before dragging his eyes up to Luhan's eyes.

 _You could drown in those eyes_ , he thinks.

“What do you want?” says Luhan, and the answer is _you_ , so Jongin steps forward, pushes Luhan back against the counter, grabs both his wrists and leans in close, close, close. He waits for Luhan to say no, to push him away, but he just smiles, not his usual angelic smile but a different one, a feline smirk, eyes hooded, so Jongin closes the distance and kisses him, hard.

Luhan bites more so than kisses. He nips at Jongin's lower lip, then licks over the sharp edges of Jongin's front teeth, inviting Jongin to do the same. He breathes warm and wet into the space between Jongin's tongue and the roof of his mouth. Jongin grinds up against Luhan, tented fronts of their pants rubbing against each other; Luhan's teeth clack against Jongin's when he throws his head back in a moan.

“Fuck me,” says Luhan, so Jongin does. They try to make it to Luhan's bedroom but can't, and settle for the tiny cramped space that passes for a living room, Luhan spreadeagled over the coffee table that's so wobbly Jongin's afraid they're going to break it, going to crash through and end up on the floor amidst sticks of splintered plywood. Luhan moans and moans, sometimes low and murmured, sometimes a high mewl that makes Jongin hiss and dig his thumbs into Luhan's hips.

Luhan's fingers scrabble over his shoulder blades; his ankles dig into the small of Jongin's back. “Jerk yourself off,” Jongin manages, and Luhan does, coming with a cry brief moments before Jongin comes as well. He closes his eyes as his orgasm shoots through him, swimming in it, drowning in it. When he opens his eyes again he's lying heavily over Luhan, who takes it in stride, doesn't even try to push Jongin off, just smiles, lazy and catlike and utterly content.

It's a few minutes before Jongin is able to bring himself to get up. He pulls his clothes back on, pushes at his sweaty bangs until they're more or less back in place. Luhan sits cross-legged on the table, naked, and watches him. That small sweet smile is playing about his lips as usual.

“Hey,” he says as Jongin's about to leave.

“What?” says Jongin, and Luhan beckons him over, pulls him down by the front of his shirt and kisses him. It's different this time, a real kiss, slow and deep, not the wild biting clashing of tongues and teeth from earlier.

Luhan lets Jongin go. “Bye,” he says, still smiling. 

Jongin toes on his shoes—“Bye,” and walks out the door. It closes with a soft but definite click behind him.

 

 

They fuck everywhere—in Luhan's apartment, in Jongin's tiny rented room, in several of Luhan's mysteriously acquired cars, in the alley next to the dance building of Seoul Arts, in one of the practice rooms, against the mirror, dirtying the glass Jongin's supposed to be cleaning with their frantic handprints, sweat-slick skin. On more than one occasion, Jongin finds himself thinking that he can get used to this, to Luhan's supple pale flesh, the breathy sounds he makes as Jongin fingers him loose, the red lines his nails leave dappled over Jongin's skin, his desperate keening in Jongin's ear before he comes.

Yixing pats Jongin on the back when he shows up for work one day.

“Congrats,” he says, and laughs at Jongin's look of confusion. “Luhan is always more agreeable when he's getting laid,” Yixing explains.

Luhan always seems agreeable enough to Jongin, but he just says, “Oh,” and Yixing shoots him another grin before leaving.

Sehun calls and Jongin doesn't pick up. Sometimes, he forgets to listen to the messages Sehun leaves without fail until days later. Sometimes, he forgets to listen to them at all.

 

 

Being with Luhan is nothing like being with Sehun. Sehun was like an anchor, stolid and safe, keeping Jongin chained down to one point, keeping him coming back to the same place, over and over.

Every day is exciting with Luhan. Every day is a new experience for Jongin. Every day they conquer a new corner of the city, mark a little pocket of space as theirs. They race through the streets and discard their fears from the rooftops; they're wild, they're invincible, they're immortal.

Nothing can hurt them, and Jongin thinks he's falling in love with that.

 

 

It's about two weeks after the first time they have sex when one of the Seoul Arts students, a boy Jongin's never spoken to before, stops Jongin in the hall.

“I've seen you with that kid, Luhan,” says the boy.

“Yeah?”

“Well.” The boy pauses, looks around to make sure no one's listening in. “I just want to warn you—he's not what he seems.”

Jongin snorts and goes back to mopping the floor. “Yeah,” he says, “thanks for the advice.”

But the boy is persistent. “No, really,” he says. “Look, he used to go here, he had a scholarship and everything, but then he got kicked out.”

“Uh huh,” says Jongin. “I already know that. He told me.”

“Well,” says the boy, “did he tell you what he got kicked out for?”

And well, Luhan hadn't really answered that question, so Jongin looks up, waiting for the answer.

“He was dating someone,” the boy says, “one of the star dancers, a year older than him. Well, it's not really important that they were dating, I guess. What's important is that the guy ends up with a broken femur and two cracked ribs, Couldn't dance anymore—had to drop out of school. And Luhan doesn't even care, even though it's his fault, doesn't apologize or anything, either, just drops the guy and then tells the disciplinary board to shove it. So they take away his scholarship and tell him to get lost.”

Jongin's throat feels dry all of a sudden.

“What happened?” he asks. “How'd he break his leg?”

The boy shrugs. “Don't ask me,” he says. “I wasn't there—I was never cool enough for Luhan's crowd.” And he turns and heads off. Jongin stands there for a couple of minutes before he remembers he's supposed to be doing a job and resumes mopping the floor. He tells himself the unsettled feeling in his stomach is just a result of the sushi he'd eaten earlier.

 

 

He isn't sure if he believes it until the next time he sees Luhan, and then he's sure he _doesn't_ believe it. He knows Luhan isn't exactly the angelic boy his face seems to suggest he is, but he also knows Luhan cares deeply about his friends—and, Jongin would hope, about Jongin himself. He stares at Luhan's face, inspecting, searching for some hint of ill will in those features without really wanting to find anything.

“What?” says Luhan, looking amused.

“Nothing,” says Jongin, and turns away a grin, feeling at ease. Luhan leans in, rests his chin on Jongin's shoulder; then, when he doesn't get a response, he nips lightly at the point where Jongin's jaw meets his neck. They tumble back into bed then, and no, Jongin thinks as he presses Luhan down into the mattress, Luhan couldn't have done something like that.

 

 

“I wonder if you even listen to these messages,” Sehun sighs.

 

 

They were sixteen the first time they slept together. They'd known each other for eleven years, since the first day in kindergarten when Jongin had refused to talk to anyone but the quiet scrawny kid who came over to lisp at him. Somehow, the fact that Sehun couldn't pronounce his words clearly made it seem less real, less intimidating, and Jongin, who'd been scared to death of the teacher and the rest of the rowdy class of five-year-olds, had felt safe enough to talk to Sehun.

That was Sehun—always safe.

They'd known each other for eleven years, been there for each other day in and day out, and somehow, sleeping together just seemed like the next step, like it was inevitable.

It wasn't perfect, but it was good, and afterwards, Sehun had lain against Jongin's side, fitting neatly against the contours of his body, and they were sweaty but the window was open and with the breeze coming in, it wasn't uncomfortable. They'd fallen asleep like that, that time and most of the times after it. They always woke up cramped and just this side of too warm, but—Jongin had to admit, there was something about it, something incredible about waking up with Sehun's warm weight pressed against him.

Jongin never wakes up with Luhan.

After sex, Luhan pushes himself into a sitting position and watches Jongin expectantly until he gets up and gets dressed. Jongin wonders what it would be like to just fuck and then fall asleep and wake up hours later, squeezed together on Luhan's twin-sized bed. He wonders if it would be like waking up with Sehun, or if it'd be different, if the weight of Luhan in his arms would be more or less than Sehun's.

He never gets to find out; he feels, somehow, that the words, “Can I sleep here?” are something he's not allowed to ask, and Luhan never invites him to stay.

Instead, Jongin finds himself walking home, walking from Luhan's tiny apartment to his tinier one, neither place feeling like home. He walks home as the sun comes up and feels like he's stuck between places, like he's still searching for something, and he can't even put his finger on what anymore.

Always in between places. Jongin reaches his building, walks up the stairs, turns the key in the knob and opens the door to an empty room.

 

 

“It rained today. I got soaked walking home from the store,” Sehun says in his message. Jongin imagines that he adds _I miss you_ at the end. It's raining in Seoul too; Jongin cradles the phone to his ear underneath the hood of his jacket and presses replay, but the message doesn't change. He hits replay again, and again, fabricating the extra words in his head so many times he can almost hear the exact lilt of Sehun's voice, the lisp on missed, the little shy stutter between words.

Almost. But not quite.

 

 

It's raining when it happens. It's raining but the underpass they're vandalizing is dry but for the wet paint staining its walls. It's Luhan and Jongin and Minseok and Jongdae, and all of them are high on adrenaline and the contents of one of Luhan's little orange bottles of pills.

Suddenly the tunnel fills with more sound than just the reverberations of their laughs and shouts. Jongin starts, dropping his paint can, and claps his hands over his ears. Red and blue lights bounce back and forth between the two walls, and a voice calls for them to stop what they're doing.

Someone yells, “Run!” and they do. They bolt, leaving cans of spray paint, labels of blue-red-gold-silver rolling every which way. A car door slams, and then there are heavy footsteps coming after them. Luhan screams, an echo of the panic welling up in Jongin, but when he turns to look at him, the expression on Luhan's face is one of delight instead.

They split up, Jongin following Luhan into the alley between two concrete buildings while Minseok and Jongdae head in the other direction. There's a yell from behind them shortly after—Jongdae's voice—and a deep voice shouting, “Got you, you little prick!” They keep running.

Finally, six zigzagging blocks away, they stop. Jongin leans against a grimy brick wall to catch his breath. Luhan squats and wipes a hand over his face.

“Shit,” says Jongin on an exhale, “shit.”

There's a breathy sound coming from Luhan. Jongin thinks at first that he's crying, but then Luhan brings the hand down from over his face and Jongin realizes that no, Luhan's not crying, he's _laughing._

“The fuck?” says Jongin, bewildered.

“Wasn't that great?” says Luhan. He reaches a hand up and Jongin, stunned into an automatic reaction, grabs it and pulls Luhan to his feet. “God, the adrenaline,” Luhan says, wobbling a little. “I haven't had this much fun in a long time.”

“Luhan,” Jongin says slowly. “That wasn't fun. That was—that was horrifying!” He stares at Luhan, who's still grinning widely. “Your—Jongdae got caught, got _arrested_ , how can you say that was fun?”

But Luhan waves Jongin's concerns away. “Whatever,” he says. “He wasn't fast enough, or he was unlucky. We got away, and that's what matters.” He steps in close to Jongin, steps up on his toes to kiss him, but Jongin turns his face away and pushes Luhan back.

“How can you say that,” he says, too shocked to make it a question. “Jongdae's your _friend.”_

“Yeah,” says Luhan. “That doesn't mean I'm responsible for him, or that I have to take _care_ of him or something—I'm not that person, and he wouldn't want me to be.”

Jongin exhales sharply. “So you're just going to leave him,” he says flatly. “You're just going to let him rot in jail. What about when they find out about the drugs? What about when they convict him of a million things and he never gets out and you never see him again?”

Luhan rolls his eyes to the sky. “It'll be fine,” he says. “If you're so worried I'll get Wufan to pull some strings, and everything will go back to normal.” Jongin doesn't say anything. Luhan looks at him. “That what you want?”

Jongin runs a hand through his hair, pushes his drenched bangs away from his forehead. He thinks of what he'd heard about Luhan, and how he'd pushed it from his mind, convinced himself Luhan couldn't have done something like that. “You're missing the point,” he tells Luhan.

Luhan crosses his arms over his chest. “What is the point then?”

Jongin sighs. “I've got to go,” he says, and heads toward the mouth of the alley.

“What's the point?” Luhan shouts after him, but Jongin doesn't turn around, doesn't reply.

 

 

Sehun calls as Jongin is walking home. His phone buzzes in his pocket, faint chime of his ringtone drifting into the air. Jongin waits for it to stop but of course it doesn't, just keeps ringing, just keeps vibrating, for what seems an eternity.

Jongin is angry then, suddenly, inexplicably, at Luhan and at himself and at Sehun.

He takes Sehun's call.

“Yeah, what?” he snaps into the receiver.

There's a sticky intake of breath, and then Sehun's voice, small, “O-oh.”

Jongin barrels past Sehun's surprise. “Why'd you tell me not to pick up? You're a fucker, Oh Sehun, a fucking passive-aggressive asshole. If you were trying to get back at me for leaving, you should have just said something about it to my face—”

“I wasn't trying to get even with you,” says Sehun, loudly, and the harshness of it, coming from him, startles Jongin into a split second of silence. It's enough for Sehun to continue.

“It wasn't anything like that,” he says. Then his voice gets quiet, so soft Jongin has to press the phone to his ear to hear: “I just wanted to see how long it would take you to miss me,” says Sehun. “I wanted to see how long it would take for you to pick up the phone.”

Jongin wants to cry suddenly, and he wants to throw the phone at the wall. Instead, he swallows hard and turns his face up to the sky, counts to ten.

“Goodbye, Sehun,” he says, and hangs up.

 

 

He sleeps during the day; he mops the floors of dance studios at Seoul Arts at night.

He doesn't see Luhan.

 

 

He runs into Yixing once.

“Hey,” he calls out, softly, not quite sure if he wants Yixing to hear him or not.

He does. “Hey,” says Yixing, and tells his friends he'll see them later before doubling back over to Jongin. “What's up?”

“I,” says Jongin, and then stops, and then starts again: “Have you seen Luhan lately?”

“Sure,” says Yixing. He looks somewhere past Jongin for a second, but when Jongin turns to see what's there, he sees nothing but wooden floorboards stretching into the darkness. “Did something,” says Yixing, “happen between the two of you?”

The answer, of course, is yes, but Jongin isn't sure if he wants to say that—isn't sure how much he's allowed to say.

“It's not important,” he says, and Yixing doesn't look convinced, looks like he wants to ask something else, but Jongin turns and walks away before Yixing can get the chance.

 

 

“You could have come with me,” says Jongin into the phone.

“You didn't ask,” Sehun replies.

Jongin rests his head between his knees. He listens to Sehun breathe until finally there's a sigh and a click and then silence on the line.

 

 

Luhan's waiting for him when he gets home a week later. No car, just Luhan, sitting on the bottom step in front of the door. He stands when he sees Jongin approaching.

“Hey,” he says. Jongin ignores him. He tries to step past him, but Luhan grabs his arm. “I said, hey,” he says again.

It's a tone Jongin's never heard from him before, but he doesn't let that faze him. “I don't want to talk to you,” he tells Luhan.

Luhan's face scrunches into something ugly, the first unattractiveness Jongin has to associate with Luhan. Or maybe it was always there, and Jongin just hadn't seen it, had looked past all the things he didn't care to notice.

“What,” says Luhan, “are you too good for me now?” Jongin shakes off Luhan's hand, tries to get to the door, but Luhan blocks his way, shoves him so that he has to step backward onto the sidewalk.

“Thought you wanted to be someone,” Luhan says. “Thought you didn't want to be just another goody-two-shoes country boy no one gives a damn about.”

“I'm telling you this is what life is like, Jongin,” he says. “If you can't handle that you're not who I thought you were.”

“You were nothing before you met me, Kim Jongin,” says Luhan. “If I hadn't come along, you'd still be nothing.”

The words cut Jongin like a knife. Before he can process that he's moved, he's turned and crossed the two yards between them and punched Luhan in the face.

Luhan hits back, swings his fist at the side of Jongin's head. Jongin punches him again, but Luhan's ready this time, dodges the blow.

Luhan fights dirty. Jongin supposes he should have expected that. Luhan scratches and bites and elbows and kicks, a frenzy of motion that Jongin's eyes can't keep up with. Jongin blocks where he can, throws punches in between blocks; they fight with sudden wordless anger, right there on the sidewalk in front of Jongin's building, until Luhan hooks a leg around the back of Jongin's leg and kicks in his knee so that Jongin falls to the floor.

Luhan steps back then; when Jongin looks up, Luhan's blinking like he's just woken up. He looks young again, looks like the little boy Jongin had met that first night, and Jongin feels exhausted.

There's a throbbing on the inside of Jongin's left cheek. He wipes at his mouth and his hand comes away red. He climbs the steps to the building's front door and sits down heavily on the topmost one. Luhan stands there a moment, breathing hard, then comes over to join him.

“We should stop,” says Jongin. _Seeing each other_ , he means, but Luhan doesn't ask that; Jongin just feels the movement beside him as Luhan nods.

“Sorry about the blood in your mouth,” says Luhan after a minute. “I wish it was mine.”

Jongin doesn't quite know what to say to that. He's quiet a moment, and then he settles on, “Me too.”

Luhan gets up, then turns to face Jongin. The circle of skin around his eye is red and just starting to swell—it'll probably be purple by the morning—or, since Jongin can see the sun starting to come up, by noon or so, perhaps.

“Are you leaving, then?” Luhan asks him. “Seoul, I mean.”

Jongin looks steadily back at him. “Does it matter?”

Luhan looks at the sky, then shrugs. “I guess not.” He shoves his hands in his pockets and turns away, steps into the street. “Bye,” he calls without looking back.

Jongin waits until Luhan's crossed the street and turned down the sidewalk, until he's walked to the end of the block and turned out of sight.

“Bye,” he says to the empty dawn.

 

 

He skips work the next evening, and the one after that. He can't say why, exactly, but it feels like there's no point, like something has ended and cleaning the floors of Seoul Arts was part of that something.

Sehun calls. Jongin doesn't pick up, lets it ring through to voicemail. He debates whether he should listen to it. He takes a shower instead. He drinks some milk, because that's the only edible thing left in his apartment. He wanders back to bed and lies there staring at the ceiling.

Finally the blinking light on his phone telling him he has a new message can't be ignored any longer. He grabs his phone, dials through to his voicemail.

“Jongin,” says Sehun, “I saw a shooting star today, and it reminded me of the first time we kissed, in your backyard, under the stars. And how perfect I thought the world was in that moment.” He pauses, then laughs a little. “Sorry,” he says. “I know you don't like to hear mushy stuff like that.” He pauses, so long that Jongin thinks he's hung up, and then:

“Jongin,” says Sehun, “I wish you were here.”

A click, then silence. Jongin presses the end call button before the voice asking if he wants to delete the message can interrupt it.

Suddenly Jongin's crying. He can't remember the last time he cried, the last time his eyes stung with the battle to keep salt water within their borders but failed, but now they do, they sting, and then fat drops of saline are falling onto the knees of his jeans, onto his sheets.

Maybe he is that goody-two-shoes country boy after all, just like Luhan had said. And maybe there's nothing wrong with that. Maybe everything Jongin's rebelled against has been an illusion, something small that he built up in his mind, read too much into, interpreted wrong. He'd thought the anonymity of his hometown was repressing him, keeping him from doing the things he wants to do, but he hasn't done anything he'd planned to since he's gotten to the city, either—maybe it's the city that's been repressing him.

And maybe, just like how Sehun had said he was waiting for Jongin to pick up the phone—well, maybe Jongin was waiting for something too. Maybe he's been waiting for Sehun to get mad at him for leaving, or tell him he shouldn't have left, or tell him he's never going to find what he's looking for.

Maybe he's been waiting for Sehun to tell him to come home.

 

 

The train is full when Jongin gets on. He finds his seat, next to a slightly overweight middle-aged woman and across the aisle from a greasy teenage kid who's got his nose stuck in a manhwa. The kid gets off two stops later, and the woman four stops after that. The crowd thins out; by the time they reach Jongin's stop, he's the only one left in the car.

He'd fallen asleep, but wakes at the announcement being broadcast overhead: “This is the final stop. All passengers must disembark now.” He rubs at his eyes, at the sleep that has congealed at the corners, then slings his duffle bag over one shoulder and steps down the aisle and off the train. He walks through the station, empty but for the single lonely worker in faded uniform, snapping his gum and bouncing a small rubber ball against the wall, over and over. He doesn't even look up as Jongin passes.

It's approaching night outside. The chirps of crickets are his only welcome, but it isn't less than he'd been expecting. Jongin looks up at the sky, still blue, but only just. The trees across from the station are silhouetted black against the dusky palette.

He finds himself reaching in his pocket for his phone. He dials a number automatically, all muscle memory and without really thinking about it, hits call.

“Hello?” a familiar voice says.

“Sehun,” says Jongin. His lips crack into a smile. “I'm back.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The lines "But damn if there isn't anything sexier / than a slender boy with a handgun, / a fast car, a bottle of pills,” and ”Sorry / about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.” are from Richard Siken's poem entitled “Little Beast.”


End file.
